Pinellas County, Fla., Ties Together Resources in Vision 2000

By FCW Staff

Mar 02, 1997

In an effort to better serve the 62 agencies it now supports, Pinellas County's Department of Management Information Services is launching an initiative designed to cut costs and provide uniformity among county systems. "What we are going to be doing is looking at the high cost of having multiple systems," said A.J. Leiser, the county's director of management information services.

The project, called Vision 2000, will rely heavily on Internet and Web-based solutions. It is aimed at "putting in place a technology infrastructure which all of the constitutional offices can agree upon, provide common data access, adhere to open industry standards and serve as the core technology standard for the county," according to a statement of the project's goals.

Plans call for Pinellas County to acquire tools to perform network management tasks, problem tracking and application development. Additionally, officials will build a countywide network on a Web architecture and develop browser-based applications to provide legacy applications, query tools and countywide interoffice applications such as e-mail, calendaring and scheduling. Still to be addressed before the gets under way are issues such as policies, procedures, standards, staffing and multiple-year budget commitments, according to project documents.

Encore Computer Corp., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., will support the Vision 2000 project, said Jack Kelly, Encore's distributor sales manager. A provider of data storage, retrieval and sharing technology, Encore is under contract to provide data sharing capabilities associated with the county's recent migration to RS/6000 servers from outdated Wang technology. Encore has also developed an Internet-based data sharing tool that is likely to be featured in Vision 2000, Kelly added.